Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Ideagen Quality Management
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Ideagen Quality Management (formerly Q-Pulse, Qualtrax and Qadex) integrates with an organization's existing processes and acts as the backbone of its processes, providing workflow automations and comprehensive document management, enabling teams to identify and rectify any issues before they arise. This solution is designed to elevate an organization's performance with digital quality management solution.
N/A
Pricing
Azure DevOps
Ideagen Quality Management
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.
Holds raw material and finished product data, and is easy to activate/deactivate specs as required. Useful for holding all supplier data on GFSI accreditation and alerts you when certification has expired and requests an update on your behalf. Allergens and nutrition in clear and easy to use format, for both raw materials and finished products.
I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
The training module is basic. If your training program is more complicated than simple onboarding training, then the Q-Pulse training module will be a bit of a challenge. It's not impossible to use, but there are better programs out there. I understand though, that this is an area that is being improved on soon.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
Q-Pulse QMS is totally integrated into our organization now. It does the job nicely and to change it would cause unnecessary disruption to our operation.
It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).
Although the platform is not the most intuitive, I have recognized Ideagen's willingness to make improvements. As such, the site is now much easier to use and navigate. I also enjoy the ability to easily keep track of courses that have been completed and courses that are due for recertification.
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
The support team for Q-Pulse QMS is fantastic. Ideagen has invested a lot in this area, opening offices all around the world. Q-Pulse QMS product managers are also very responsive to requests and improvement suggestions. Ideagen also hosts annual conferences, which bring their customers together where ideas can be shared and we can meet the people developing the program.
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
I was not involved in solution selection, but this solution is fit for purpose for a number of different tools that we could be paying for as well. We are not purchasing an HR workflow tool because the workflows accommodate most of our needs and the one that it doesn't aren't necessarily appropriate anyway. Regulatory software validations are performed in Ideagen because the overhead of a software specific tool is more that what we require. The upside is that all of those records are in a consolidated location for an audit.
We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.
